Tag: Rave Culture

This text is an amalgam of various 0rphan Drift performances and lectures written by Mer for a symposium on audio art at Radcliffe college, Oxford in 1999. It encapsulates the core themes of the collaborative artist 0rphan Drift, many of which are reflected in the current collaborative works of Mer Roberts and Ranu Mukherjee.

This blog is a place of speculative futurism and evolutionary fever dream for the 21st century. Science fictional and fantastical explorations fuse with current theory. A distributed consciousness searches for matter's virtual zones of existence.

When 0D told us that they had decided to let Cyberpositive in, we nodded and laughed like innocent fools. Some of us even tried to help them. Over the months that followed, it gathered beyond the screens, retooling 0D to its senseless purpose. They were gone, utterly, but perhaps not irreparably. In any case, we spoke to them almost as before, although now it was scanning us.

Cyberpositive begins as a text collage to an installation by the multimedia art collective 0rphan Drift at the Cabinet Gallery in 1994. The insistent signal that became Cyberpositive transforms into an anomaly from the unknown, unequivocally in control of its own arrival and composition.

Mer met the journalist and cultural critic Tony Marcus, when he reviewed the first 0rphan Drift show at the Cabinet Gallery in London in 1994. The depth and sensitivity of his thinking never ceases to astound. He has been writing various artists' texts over the past few years, and now this interview.

Delphi Carstens met Mer on the street in Capetown a decade ago, him clutching a copy of Deleuze and Guattari's 'A Thousand Plateaus' under his arm. Since then they have collaborated on several major journal articles, video projects and most currently, researching his phd on the hyperstitions that are manifesting apocalypse. His essay on Mer's current work coincides with the 4th chapter of his phd, which addresses the role of 0rphan Drift and CCRU as 'renegade academics' and speculative futurists.

As Capetown's main science fictional theorist, Delphi Carstens is spliced into the writings of Nick Land and the CCRU. This text is the core of his current phd which maps the application of hyperstitional navigation to contemporary culture. It highlights many of the themes in the current work of Mer Roberts.

Frieze, Issue 133, September 2010. In the 'State of the Art' editorial, Jörg Heiser describes a phenomenon he has provisionally called 'super-hybridity'. Hito Steyerl characterizes super-hybridity as 'Immersion, entanglement, affectivity, sudden rupture and repeated breakdown'; Ronald Jones compares it to transdisciplinarity; Seth Price wonders whether it is about the effect of digital production tools; Nina Power warns against its neo-Romantic vision.

This text is an amalgam of various 0rphan Drift performances and lectures written by Mer for a symposium on audio art at Radcliffe college, Oxford in 1999. It encapsulates the core themes of the collaborative artist 0rphan Drift, many of which are reflected in the current collaborative works of Mer Roberts and Ranu Mukherjee.